2014: The Year of The Tours and Activities

Tours and Activities had a big year in 2014. Tourist numbers are up across the board and travellers are looking for more experiences from their trips away. Skift had a good article highlighting the rise of experiential travel in 2014. The days of baking beside a pool for a week appear to be over!

The highlight of the year was the mouth watering $200m million sale of tours and activities marketplace Viator to Tripadvisor – see article. This is a pretty big move for the sector and should finally signal the opening up of tours and activities to mainstream distribution.

Getyourguide also continued to blaze a path despite being cut off by Tripadvisor – who have provided a book now link on your Tripadvisor page if you listed with them. They raised another big bundle of cash to fund their growth across the sector.

The Tripadvisor acquisition is interesting as until recently Viator followed a curated model where you had to apply and be accepted as their supplier. There was quite a delay in getting listed and it typically only really worked on free sale tours.

With the Tripadvisor acquisition this is now changing. Viator is now opening up to everybody.

In the near future Viator will allow all suppliers to list on its system and have a book now button from Tripadvisor (we assume this is the case, only if you agree). They’ve also started to open up to technology providers to help suppliers be directly integrated with their systems.

In practice this means that you will no longer have to manually reconcile bookings you receive from Viator via email with the rest of your business. The bookings will flow directly into your reservation system with the rest of your bookings.

If your’re an Acteavo customer, we’re pleased to announce that we have been selected by Viator to integrate with them and in the very near future we will offer direct integration with Viator for all of our customers.

If you’re not yet a customer, get in touch to find out more or sign up for your free trial today!